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Featured in Development

Alex Bradbury gives an overview of the status and development of RISC-V as it relates to modern operating systems, highlighting major research strands, controversies, and opportunities to get involved.

Featured in Architecture & Design

Will Jones talks about how Habito, the leading digital mortgage broker, benefited from using Haskell, some of the wins and trade-offs that have brought it to where it is today and where it's going next. He also talks about why functional programming is beneficial for large projects, and how it helps especially with migrating the data store.

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Katharine Jarmul discusses research related to fair-and-private ML algorithms and privacy-preserving models, showing that caring about privacy can help ensure a better model overall and support ethics.

Featured in Culture & Methods

This personal experience report shows that political in-house games and bad corporate culture are not only annoying and a waste of time, but also harm a lot of initiatives for improvement. Whenever we become aware of the blame game, we should address it! DevOps wants to deliver high quality. The willingness to make things better - products, processes, collaboration, and more - is vital.

Featured in DevOps

Service mesh architectures enable a control and observability loop. At the moment, service mesh implementations vary in regard to API and technology, and this shows no signs of slowing down. Building on top of volatile APIs can be hazardous. Here we suggest to use a simplified, workflow-friendly API to shield organization platform code from specific service-mesh implementation details.

Intel Found That Spectre and Meltdown Fix Has a Performance Hit of 0-21%

Microsoft, Red Hat and Intel have published their performance evaluation of the impact Meltdown and Spectre mitigation has on various systems.

There are a total of three variants for Spectre and Meltdown, two for Spectre (Variant 1 and 2) and one for Meltdown (Variant 3). In their benchmark tests Microsoft has concluded that “Variant 1 and Variant 3 mitigations have minimal performance impact, while Variant 2 remediation, including OS and microcode, has a performance impact.” Without providing numbers, they further detailed their finding as follows:

There is insignificant performance impact on Windows 10 for desktop users with Intel Skylake, Kabylake or newer CPU

There is a noticeable performance decrease for Windows 7/8/10 for desktop users with Intel Haswell or older CPU

There is a “significant performance impact“ for Windows Server applications on any processor, especially I/O intensive ones

Regarding the 45 editions of Windows that Microsoft is supporting at this time, the process of patching has been started for 41 one of them through the Windows Update channel, and the other four are to be updated soon. Among the latter are a few editions of Windows Server 2008/2012 and Windows Embedded 8.

<2% reduction in performance for applications using Linux accelerator technologies that do not go through the kernel but perform direct access to devices

2-5% for CPU intensive jobs that usually run in user space

3-7% for applications with “significant sequential disk or network traffic”. Applications running on the Java VM fall in this category

8-19% for applications with high kernel-to-user space transitions. An example are OLTP workloads

Intel has been criticized for not providing data on how the Meltdown and Spectre fixes are affecting the performance of their CPUs. Now they have published their benchmark results, some of the most comprehensive so far. For a complete description of the findings, the hardware, OS and benchmarks used for testing, we recommend reading the benchmark table (PDF) made available. We summarize here their findings:

There are better results for PCMark 10 across all systems tested, around 1-5%. PCMark simulates home workloads

Even better results for 3DMark Sky Diver with negligible performance impact of 0-1%. 3DMark Sky Diver is a graphics benchmark

5-10% performance hit for web applications running in Edge or IE

Results vary much based on the benchmark, the processor and the mitigation used. It is advisable for companies to benchmark their own applications to see if performance is affected much and decide if something needs to be done about it.